A survey of 1039 Australians currently living overseas or recently returned found 69 per cent of them had derived no benefit from collaborating with home while they were away, and a worrying 25 per cent said this was because Australian-based peers weren't interested.

'When I came home, that tall poppy syndrome – which was lurking in the back of my head the entire time I was overseas – had metastasised, We still have it," said Ms Bell, who spent 18 years as the resident anthropologist at Intel, and remains a vice-president of the company following her return to home town Canberra last year to run an Australian National University research institute grappling with the rise of artificial intelligence.

Intel executive Genevieve Bell says she has received 'a surprising amount of pushback' since returning to Australia. Louie Douvis

"Problem two is it's become perverted into this notion about managing risk, like 'you don't want to set things up to be successful, because success will expose you to tall poppy syndrome'. So now we are going to mitigate risk to zero, which of course means the possibility of doing anything interesting has gone to zero too."

Ms Bell's comments help explain why the survey, conducted by PwC and expatriate member organisation Advance, found that 24 per cent of expatriates never engaged with peers in Australia, and 49 per cent only as necessary.

"You can be a senior person in a world-leading organisation overseas, and come back to Australia and be a nobody."

However, departees should not be resented as a "brain drain", but rather an opportunity to lift the low, job-destroying track record of Australian business on external collaboration, a report accompanying the survey said.

Only 7.7 per cent of Australian businesses collaborate with international firms on innovation projects, putting Australia 27th out of the OECD's 31 countries.

Only 24.9 per cent of Australian firms co-operate with any outside organisation on innovation, versus an OECD average of 32.4 per cent, while the 4.1 per cent of Australian firms that collaborate with higher education or government institutions ranks Australia second last.

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PwC has modelled that if Australia was able to lift itself to the level of the top five largest collaborators in the OECD, then the increase to gross domestic product over the next 10 years would be $23.5 billion.

Michelle Guthrie, who spent most of her career working in Asia before returning to her home town of Sydney in 2016 to run the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, said working with the current or returned diaspora could fast-track change that was necessary for Australian business.

"Your ability to cope with disruption is better for having had the international experience, you're not frightened by things being different today compared to yesterday," she told the authors of the report.

Since returning, Ms Guthrie said the "entrepreneurial culture" she had experienced in Asia was in stark contrast to how some Australian organisations tended to look to government for more regulation to solve problems.

"You have retailers here who expect government to regulate Netflix or Amazon, but when it comes down to it, if you are providing a better consumer experience – as Amazon will be if it can get to two-hour delivery in Australia – at a cheaper price, then that's what's going to win, not government regulating them," Ms Guthrie said.

"I get the sense there is more focus on the market environment instead of on the customer."

International experience

Some local executives may scoff at such comments coming from the head of an organisation that is shielded from commercial reality to some degree by government funding, however Ms Guthrie said the parochial problems of Australian business ran deeper.

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She observed that few people on executive teams or boards in Australia had international experience, which she believed was to their detriment.

"If you look at any multinationals, it's completely the other way around. Someone like Proctor & Gamble or any of the big miners who operate internationally, all their executives have done stints in Latin America or in Asia or in London or wherever," said Ms Guthrie, herself a former Advance.org director and regular attendee of its Asian networking events.

"That's normal. But it's unusual to have that kind of experience on the boards of Australian companies."

The report by PwC and Advance.org recommended the federal government develop a national policy for its diaspora, which PwC estimated would number 1.35 million by 2030, with one-third of those in Asia.

The policy should include the first attempt to map the demographics, location and activities of the diaspora, as well as a "diaspora co-ordination secretariat" within the federal government, which could for example provide links between researchers, innovators and commercialisers within Australia and its diaspora.

"What I think I bring back to Australia is a mindset," said Adrian Turner, who in 2015 returned from 18 years in Silicon Valley to run the CSIRO's data innovation group, Data61.

"I have a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset, an ambition and a scale of thinking with global context, and that's what is needed for Australia to compete."

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Michael Bailey writes on entrepreneurship and the arts. He is also responsible for the Financial Review's Rich Lists. He is based in Sydney." Connect with Michael on Twitter. Email Michael at m.bailey@afr.com.au